Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition by Josh Alan Friedman Read Free Book Online Page A

including Raven De La Croix, Candy Samples, Chesty Morgan, the aging Tempest Storm, and young stripaholic Hyapatia Lee. “The few that are honorable,” he says, referring to those pros who show up at their gigs.
    He loves to gab with the gals on the phone when they play the Big Apple, though his services have become less required in their careers. “They all have different riders on their contracts,” Charnoff explains. “Like Sammy Davis, you gotta bring him thirteen ice cubes in a bucket, if there’s fourteen he gets mad. You’re dealing with crazy or temperamental people. They’re all insane. The kind of work strippers are doing, they’re not in their right mind to begin with. They’re not performers like Milton Berle or Henny Youngman that made sacrifices or disciplined themselves to get ahead, with goals to reach, like playing the Palace. All they do is show their body. You don’t call that entertainment, do ya?”
    Charnoff began with strippers late in his career, having booked variety acts into supper clubs all his life. “When some of my nightclubs started to change Over, I didn’t know one stripper from another—I still don’t and I’m not interested. I wouldn’t deal with these girls, I always called an agent who featured strippers whenever a nightclub required them. The variety act went out, the magician went out, the ventriloquist went out. I was forced to use these strippers. I was in a business, I had to stay with it, so I called other agents who had stables of girls. Even then, they were a different kind of stripper. They had continuity, choreography, wardrobe, luggage. The girls today, they have a rug. So they don’t get a splinter in their ass when they spread.”
    Jess Mack, premier strippers’ agent in Las Vegas, whose example Charnoff followed, had his original office in Times Square’s Paramount Building. Mack began as a burlesque straight man on 42nd Street in 1924. He continued working the out-of-town circuit, nearly a hundred burlesque theaters coast to coast, after La Guardia outlawed burlesque in New York. In the early 1950s he became an agent, explaining that the days of burlesque had ended.
    “When the Apollo opened on 42nd Street, we had Gypsy Rose Lee and Georgia Southern as our feature attractions,” remembers Mack. “Plus sixteen chorus girls, three comedians, three straight men, and a vaudeville act. That was the backbone of burlesque. You don’t see that now, there’s no burlesque,” he laments, his voice trailing off with irritation. “There are strip shows, but I don’t call that burlesque. Now they have what they call ‘stripperama.’ Strip, strip, strip. That’s all.”
    Both agents profess to being proud family men who never ran casting couches. But Irv Charnoff, with a vaudeville background, tends to dismiss burlesque in comparison: “One was family theater, and the other was just for morons.” As for pornography, Charnoff states, “I apply myself to it, but I won’t accept it.”
    “I don’t care for pornography,” says Mack. “It ruined burlesque, put everybody out of work. How can you enjoy something that hurt you financially, that hurt your career? I don’t book 42nd Street—I book coast to coast, Europe, Hong Kong, Singapore. I spoke to Guam today. Agents book wherever they can.” Mack feels there are under a half-dozen genuine striptease queens left today. “Stripping is not burlesque. We had burlesque long before we had stripping. But nobody’s come close to Ann Corio or Gypsy Rose Lee. If they did, you’d see their name in lights.”
    By the 1930s, any American town with over 100,000 in population had a burlesque house. In addition to the featured strippers, each theater employed a line of six to eight chorus dancers in skimpy outfits doing risqué material—an easy way for dolls to break into show biz. Geoffrey Gorer, a British critic who’d attended a dozen New York burlesque houses in the mid-Thirties, found “Miss June